It’s no secret that the games Patrick assigns for Thursday are more annoying to play than those he assigns for Tuesday, so logically I expected Universal Paperclips to follow that trend. It was 5:00 PM on Monday when I started playing, and after clicking the link in the syllabus and being redirected to a plain, monochrome aesthetic––the only discernable objective to continue making paperclips–– I feared that my suspicions of discomfort were correct. I dreaded having to play this game for seven hours.
I made my first paperclip. Nothing happened. I made my second paperclip. Nothing happened. I started spamming the paperclip button out of impatience. Funds started accumulating and more options became available. I shifted public demand in order to maximize profit, and after accumulating more funds started buying autoclippers and repleneshing my wire. I reached 2000 paperclips and gained computational resources. I accumulated operations and quickly improved my autoclipper performance, wire extrusion and marketing effectiveness. My funds and paperclips both quickly skyrocketed, and so did my enjoyment.
There was a kind of rush that I was experiencing as I watched my paperclip amount start to rise exponentially. It felt good to keep making paperclips, and I couldn’t stop myself from making more and more. My paperclips quickly went from 10000 to 100000, then 100000 to 1000000, then 1000000 to 1000000000 as I started investing and earning Yomi to upgrade my investment engine, optimizing the performance of my over 150 megaclippers and boosting my marketing level to 25.
At this point, I was tired and remembered I had a Canvas post to write for SOSC, so I exited the game after reaching a billion paperclips, convinced that I could finish my Canvas post and make it to two billion paperclips before midnight. And there it was––10:53 P.M in the top right-hand corner of my MacBook’s home screen. Oops.
The first emotion I remember experiencing was stress, since I thought it was much earlier than 11:00 PM and my unbegun Canvas post was due in an hour. But, after barely finishing and submitting it, I started thinking about Universal Paperclips, this game I thought would amount to nothing but monotonous clicking that made me not only completely lose track of time, but did it to an extent larger than anything else I can recall in my life. What had started as a banal clicking experience transformed into the quickest seven hours of my life (yes, I played for at least another hour later).
A question that Patrick raised on Thursday was how Universal Paperclips is a critique of gamification, and it seemed like everyone had a problem with the question. And I agree––the question is hard to answer. Universal Paperclips does not seem like it’s critiquing gamification. But still, it’s hard to ignore how monumentally this game managed to shatter my expectations of what a “fun” game could comprise––by “fun” I mean managing to maintain my attention for hours. And I feel like other people in class experienced the same thing. So, given that this game totally undermined my perception of “fun,” I perceive the question opposite to how other people seemed to receive it. Universal Paperclips is a critique of gamification, but not in the negative sense; rather, the game recognizes the merits of gamification and communicates essentially what McGonigal does in her book Reality is Broken through its engrossing gameplay. It shows that games can be educational (albeit Universal Paperclips is not the best example, please refer to Henry’s awesome post) and gripping, so using gamification as a way to solve problems and fix the world is not a farfecthed concept––as long as susceptibility to gaming addiction is also taken into consideration, which in the case of Universal Paperclips was not.
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